The present invention relates to the creation of digital media in a computer network environment. In particular, the invention relates to systems and methods for development of animated characters and digital media.
Digital media content developers, professionals and amateurs alike, are not immune from the desire of instant gratification from their creative efforts. However, with current animation tools, digital content, such as comic book-type characters, can take several hours, days or even weeks for an author to view what he or she has created. For example, a professional animator must animate for many hours or days, frame-by-frame before he or she can play back the final result to see the fruits of their labor. Similarly, a regular consumer, taking part in a media contest must wait many weeks or months to see whether their idea is the winner of a contest and then wait for the professional execution of the idea.
It would be more productive for creators of digital content to obtain instant feedback on what they have created. By providing instant feedback from animation tools, for example, authors can make improvements to their work as they create them or experiment without being inefficient or unproductive. Animators, for example, would like to see the characters they create in motion as the characters are created. The benefits to such an animation tool are obvious: instant feedback, an enhanced creative process, and increased productivity. This is also true for non-professionals who have taken an avocational interest in animation whether for personal use or for use in more public forums, such as collaborative community settings. Such non-professional users, such as members of a television show audience or visitors/contributors to an animation web site, can offer their animated creations as potential contributions to a story line, a competition or other context. These types of users or consumers would also benefit greatly from the instant feedback and playback of their animation and the enhanced creative process such animation tools could provide.
Digital media content, such as animation, is typically created by a single author or a comparatively small creative team and delivered to a mass audience. A general audience's ability to consume and produce such media content is highly asymmetrical, in that the audience often views such content, yet rarely creates it. Currently, there are few systems or tools for people to create media with anything approaching the ease with which it is viewed and heard. Therefore, it would further enhance the creative process involved in creating such digital media content if an animation tool that provides instant feedback also allows the audience to create its own original characters.
Thus, an improved digital media creation and production tool that addresses these issues is needed.